So, I saw the movie Wedding Crashers over the weekend. It was likable enough, if not quite deserving of the critical praise that’s been heaped upon it. I suspect folks are making a big deal out of this one because it’s the first film of its type in a very long time that appeals to grown-up sensibilities, rather than pandering to the mid-teen demographic. In other words, it’s an R-rated comedy about 30-something guys that happily admits to being what it is instead of compromising itself down to a PG-13 that’s too hard-core for kids and too wimpy for adults, as so many others have done in recent years. In that respect, the movie was quite refreshing, and I personally enjoyed seeing the aging-but-still-beautiful Jane Seymour and the aging-but-still-uber cool Christopher Walken in memorable supporting roles.

The movie did leave me with one big, nagging question, though: what is the deal with Owen Wilson?

Seriously, can any of my three loyal readers explain to me the appeal of this guy? How is it that he’s achieved leading-man status? As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, he probably would’ve made a decent living from sidekick roles but I doubt he would’ve had a shot at the lead. These days, however, he apparently fits somebody’s definition of “movie star,” and I’ll be damned if I can figure out why.

Don’t get me wrong. Mr. Wilson seems like a nice enough chap, and I don’t really mind watching him. Unlike, say, Adam Sandler, I don’t want to injure him every time he appears on the screen. But he’s so damnably, stubbornly, defiantly ordinary that I don’t understand how he could’ve possibly become the lead — the romantic lead, no less — in a high-grossing, box-office hit.

I guess I have a hopelessly old-fashioned idea of what a movie star is supposed to be.

Consider this: if Wedding Crashers had been made fifty years ago, Wilson’s role would’ve been played by Cary Grant, or maybe Tony Curtis. If it had been done in the ’60s, Sinatra and Dean Martin could’ve handily substituted for Wilson and his co-star, Vince Vaughn (whose burgeoning stardom I do understand and condone, by the way). In the ’70s, we might’ve seen a Wedding Crashers made with Redford and Newman, and an ’80s-vintage WC probably would’ve cast Tom Selleck as the nice guy who’s tired of the game, the part Wilson plays today. You see where I’m going with this? Movie stars used to be larger-than-life, both in the way they looked and the way they behaved. They weren’t so beautiful or exotic that we in the audience couldn’t identify with them, but they had a competitive edge on us average joes and janes, and we loved them for it. We looked up to them. We wanted to be them. And even when the movie stars weren’t any better looking than us — and there were plenty who weren’t — there was still an ineffable something that set them apart from us. They were stronger, cooler, funnier, classier. Something.

But that was the old days. Things are different now, as I said the other day. And to see how different they are, we need look no further than to the star of Wedding Crashers, Owen Wilson.

Let’s start with his appearance. He’s a reasonably attractive guy, but not what I would call “handsome.” Granted, I’m appraising him from a solidly heterosexual male perspective, but at best I’d call him “cute.” His customarily shaggy blond haircut is the age-inappropriate ‘do of a guy who never got past his glory days as a teenage surf-bum. His pouty lower lip has a tendency to crease right in the middle, making it look as if he didn’t use enough ChapStick during the dry season. (For about half of Wedding Crashers, I was wincing in sympathetic pain for that nasty split lip. Then I realized that it’s not split at all, that’s just how the guy’s mouth looks. Ugh.) And then there’s his nose.

My god, Owen Wilson’s nose.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a nose that’s so… eccentric. Seriously, everytime Wilson’s nose is in frame, I can’t think of anything else. I obsess on it, trying to imagine what the hell must’ve happened to it. It looks like Wilson must’ve called Jake LaMotta a pussy, then got the thing set by a drunken quack, then did a faceplant into a mail box before it finished healing and ultimately decided to just let nature take its course. Bob Hope’s nose was often likened to a ski-jump, but Owen’s schnoz resembles a ski-run, complete with moguls and flat spots and that whole back-and-forth topography that eventually gets you down the hill. Not to be too judgmental, but a nose like that is about all the proof you really need to demonstrate how far our standards of male beauty have slipped.

But it’s not just the man’s nose that makes me wonder at his stardom; it’s his persona, as well. Like I said, there have been movie stars in the past that weren’t all that good-looking — Humphrey Bogart, for example, was a pretty ordinary guy in the looks department, but he exuded what we would later come to know as cool. Or, to use a less colloquial word, he had charisma. Charisma is like a magnetic field that radiates off those who are lucky enough to possess it; it draws us in, makes us want to watch that person. Again, Owen Wilson seems like a nice guy, but I can’t see anything radiating off of him at all. He’s just like everybody else in the charisma department, i.e., he’s basically lacking it. His laid-back drawliness is perfectly pleasant, but not at all exciting. He’s like that guy you knew back in high school, the one you always liked but haven’t thought about in years, not until you find out that he’s running the shop where you have your oil changed.

Yes, that’s right: we’ve reached a point of such pop-cultural blandness that our old gym-class buddy who manages the Minit Lube down the street could be the same guy who sweeps the pretty girl off her feet in this week’s number-four at the box-office. Some people probably find it appealing, maybe even comforting, to think that our movie stars aren’t any different than the rest of us. Me, I just don’t get it…

But it was an okay little movie.